AMIRA SKEGGS

Revisiting Awe in the Age of Digital Reproduction

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
― Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future

‘Postcard syndrome’ is a term my friend and I coined on a recent trip to Albania—a feeling of flatness, or unreality, in the presence of postcard-perfect beauty. New to both of us (we were typically enthusiastic travellers), we spent much of that week on the Albanian coast unpacking it.

We had arrived with all the usual anticipation: after a long summer chained to desks in landlocked cities, we were both longing for sun-drenched beaches. The Ionian coastline was exactly as promised—pristine white sand, clear, calm water. Every day brought with it perfect weather, but we both felt flat. At first, we blamed our disappointment on travel fatigue: the journey had been long; we just needed to adjust.

But the blue skies kept coming, and we passed hours—then days—lounging on beach chairs waiting for the rush, that feeling of awe at being somewhere beautiful, to arrive. Neither of us wanted to be the first to admit our disenchantment. By the third day, when fatigue was no longer a credible excuse, we finally turned to each other and confessed: something was off.

After several attempts to dissect what we were feeling—this thing that surfaced morning after morning despite the perfect conditions—we landed on an absence. Our antennae, the pleasure sensors that once had us wide-eyed with wonder, seemed broken. Without that sense of awe we’d always felt in places like this, everything flattened: the food tasted bland, the sun weak, like we were trapped inside a postcard unable to experience the real thing.

Upon further interrogation (switching off has never been our strength), we realised that this flatness came from familiarity. The coastline looked like images, or versions of images, we’d seen thousands of times: the same turquoise gradient, the same rented umbrellas, the same Aperol spritz balanced on the same wooden table. These ingredients of “Mediterranean summer core” had been sliced into fragments and fed to us so relentlessly that we’d built an overpowering representation of place—so strong that we felt certain we’d already been there, though neither of us had travelled anywhere near the region. The result was a jarring sense of déjà vu that gave everything a stale edge.

This notion of false familiarity wasn’t entirely new to me. I’d felt it before visiting New York for the first time, after years of absorbing it through films and television. The streets, replayed endlessly on screen, felt so recognisable that I often knew where I was in the city, despite never having set foot in America. But New York is a city with infinite representations, and this sense of déjà vu is to be expected; if you consume any form of popular culture, it is difficult not to construct a mental model of the city.

In contrast, the Albanian coast has very little cultural presence. A rural stretch of shoreline—half-finished hotels and construction sites—up-and-coming but not cemented in the global imagination. My friend and I aren’t heavy social media users, and we’d chosen the destination on a friend’s recommendation, having seen barely any images of it. This made the sensation of pre-experienced familiarity all the more jarring.

Our experience brings to mind a broader phenomenon that seems to be affecting how we travel. In a visually saturated age, it feels increasingly common for representation to precede experience: we travel somewhere new, which has already been constructed in strong mental images. Travel becomes less about discovery and more about verifying mental models. This shift echoes older debates about reproduction and authenticity, specifically how the ability to reproduce an object may hinder novelty and ultimately our capacity for awe.

The process of reproduction—the ability to recreate art, objects, even places—has been examined thoroughly in disciplines like art history. In his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction[1] (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), the German philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that this new capacity to copy artworks through photography and film fundamentally changed how we perceive art. Previously confined to the studio or gallery, art could now be fractured into thousands of representations—the Mona Lisa on a postcard, a print above the sofa, a screensaver on a phone—each detached from its original context.

Benjamin saw this as having both emancipatory and corrosive effects: reproduction democratized art, releasing it from the private salons of the elite and placing it within reach of the masses. Yet this same process also eroded the artwork’s aura—its unique presence in time and space—which could only be felt in the encounter with the singular object itself. To reproduce an artwork endlessly was to dilute its aura, dissolving its authenticity and severing it from its original context. As Benjamin wrote, “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

This idea—that repetition through reproduction fractures or dilutes the essence of a thing—applies directly to how we now engage with travel and place. In our modern age of mechanical and, increasingly, digital reproduction, the ubiquitous camera allows destinations to be endlessly replicated through photographs and videos. These reproductions circulate on social media, shaping where we choose to go before being reproduced again as each traveller seeks to create their own version of the same scene.

In this cycle of replication, the aura of place—its capacity to evoke reverence or awe—thins. The sense of novelty that once defined arrival is replaced by recognition because, more often than not, we are encountering an image we’ve already seen a thousand times over. This raises the question of whether true awe is still possible when every destination has, to some degree, already been seen.

To answer this, it’s helpful to turn to psychological theories of awe, which outline how factors like novelty shape how and when we feel it. The most established psychological theory defines awe as an emotion with two essential components: vastness and need for accommodation[2].

Perceived vastness refers to the sense of being in the presence of something grand—anything that exceeds one’s ordinary frame of reference.

Need for accommodation describes the mental demand to revise or expand existing mental frameworks to make sense of that vastness. It’s the cognitive stretch that turns simple admiration into awe—the feeling that your current way of understanding the world is no longer sufficient, that you must enlarge it to comprehend what you’re seeing. For instance, if you’d only ever lived inland, your first sight of the ocean would trigger a profound need for accommodation.

Reproduction still allows space for vastness: scale often escapes the frame of a photograph or video, and it’s possible to be overcome by sheer size or beauty. What’s more elusive now is the need for accommodation. Our collective understanding of the world has become so saturated—so visually and conceptually expansive—that this cognitive demand may no longer arise. When only vastness remains but not the need for accommodation, researchers suggest the result is deference rather than awe: we respect or appreciate the landscape, but we are not transformed by it.

A second important phenomenon is hedonic adaptation: the process by which repeated exposure to a stimulus dulls our ability to derive pleasure from it. Researchers have applied this idea to travel, finding that frequent trips can lead to emotional numbness as tourism experiences become predictable and routine[3]. The more exposure we have, the less pleasure we feel.

Digital reproduction may intensify this effect. Through the endless scroll of images, we may now undergo hedonic adaptation before the journey even begins, engaging in a kind of pseudo-travel through our screens. By the time we finally arrive, we’ve already seen the view, and the awe it might once have provoked has already been spent.

The question that follows is how we might reclaim our capacity for awe (‘awe activism’, if you will) —how we might reawaken that cognitive mechanism that asks the mind to revise itself in the presence of something new. One obvious answer is novelty: if we continually encounter the unfamiliar, our existing mental frameworks are naturally challenged. Yet in the context of travel, novelty is largely beyond our control. Truly unmediated places are increasingly rare—remote, inaccessible, or vanishing altogether under the forces of globalisation.

This erosion of novelty is compounded by a growing sameness: a convergence of aesthetics shaped by the endless reproduction of images. Developing destinations, particularly those courting Western tourism, often model themselves on familiar templates of beauty and leisure. In Albania, this meant emulating Italy’s dolce vita to the degree that Albanian dishes disappeared from menus. More broadly, this aesthetic convergence has the potential to erode the conditions necessary for awe.

If novelty is vanishing, we might be forced to look elsewhere to cultivate a sense of awe. Another approach might be to reduce our exposure to representations, so that we don’t construct such strong cognitive models before arrival. Easier said than done: our data-sharing ecosystems now ensure that even a single flight search can flood an entire feed with travel recommendations (though private browsers and location settings can help). If we can’t avoid the feeds altogether, the next step might be to interfere with the reproduction loops—to resist participating in the constant circulation of place (I realise this essay is itself a form of reproduction).

Again, easier said than done, and I’m not one to talk. More often than not, I share videos and photos from my travels. In many ways, that act of sharing has become integral to how we validate travel itself. Travel photography has become a visible form of cultural capital, bringing both social and economic rewards. Understanding these incentives doesn’t make them easier to resist, but reframing this compulsion to document and post as a kind of sacrifice of awe has made me reconsider my own behaviour.

Some social movements have already moved in this direction. #Latergram—posting only after the experience—tries to encourage presence. However, to actually reduce reproduction would mean abstaining from posting altogether. That is, of course, not simple. Entire economies now depend on social-media tourism: hotels, restaurants, and local guides rely on the visibility that online reproduction brings. To withdraw completely would also mean withdrawing income and attention from communities whose livelihoods are tied to being seen. In many ways, the ability to opt out of digital exposure has itself become a form of privilege—it is a luxury to disengage.

More personally sustainable pathways to awe might instead involve reimagining how we travel. One approach is temporal displacement—deliberately experiencing places at the “wrong” times: beach towns in winter, cities at dawn—to disrupt the idealised image of place. Another is to go deep rather than wide: to spend weeks rather than days somewhere, learning the language, cooking local food, engaging with local politics. Such immersion can restore a sense of novelty and authenticity that light, image-oriented travel rarely affords.

On our last night in Albania, the feeling finally came. Hungry after a day at the beach, we wandered into a small tavern—half its lights out, perched beside a busy highway, overlooking a construction site. A young Greek-Albanian woman greeted us with a wide smile and two worn menus. Everything, she said, was homemade, though we needn’t bother checking the menus; she had only a few dishes available: saganaki, Greek salad, eggplant, and the open bottle of wine. We agreed to her selection.

The food arrived on chipped ceramics, warm and simple. For dessert, she brought portokalopita—a syrup-soaked orange pie made with phyllo and spices. It was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. At the first bite, my friend and I looked at each other, eyes wide, and realised we were both feeling it—that long-awaited spark of joy, summoned by nothing more than a few simple layers of syrupy pastry. We were both deeply relieved: we weren’t broken, just recalibrated by an age where finding awe requires a closer look.

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[1] Benjamin, W. (1935/1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–252). New York: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1935)

[2] What is awe? On an uncontested definition, conceptual ambiguities, and cultural limitations.

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517725000603?via%3Dihub; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13683500.2025.2533884

Amira Skeggs is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, based in Berlin. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach, often combining different methods to explore human experience, culture, and the interplay between self and place.